FISHES OF THE GULF OF MAINE 



401 



with long seanes or basse nets, which stop in the fish : and 

 the water ebbing from them they are left on the dry ground, 

 sometimes two or three thousand at a set, which are salted 

 up against winter, or distributed to such as have present 

 occasion either to spend them in their homes or use them 

 for their grounds. 



He also describes 3 how "shoales of basse have 

 driven up shoales of mackerel from one end of the 

 sandie beach to the other," near Salem, and men- 

 tions them in the Merrimac. In the earliest rec- 

 ord the chief centers of abundance for them within 

 the Gulf were Cape Cod Bay and the shore of Cape 

 Cod; the neighborhood of Boston Bay and harbor; 

 the vicinity of the Merrimac River; the Kennebec 

 River and vicinity, and the larger rivers that drain 

 into the Bay of Fundy. Inexhaustible, however, 

 though the supply seemed, a decrease was reported 

 as early as the last half of the eighteenth century. 

 At first this was apparent only locally. For 

 example, fewer were seen in the Piscataqua after 

 about 1792. And very few were reported there 

 from about 1880 down to 1936 or 1937, when the 

 young fish, that were hatched in southern waters 

 in 1934, appeared in our Gulf in such numbers 

 (p. 402). 



They seem to have continued moderately plenti- 

 ful in Massachusetts Bay and around Cape Cod 

 during the first half of the nineteenth century, 

 when bass were still being netted in abundance 

 along the beaches between Boston and Cohasset; 

 300 good-sized fish were taken in one seine haul 

 at the mouth of Barnstable Harbor in July 1829; 

 while 700 were taken at Provincetown in a day in 

 October 1859. Fishing for bass from the rocks 

 with hook and line was a well recognized sport then 

 around Massachusetts Bay. But Freeman wrote 

 as long ago as 1862 (in his History of Cape Cod) 

 that the bass were much less plentiful in Cape 

 Cod waters then than they had been of old. And 

 the catch for Cape Cod Bay and the outer shore 

 of the Cape, combined, reached 2,000 pounds in 

 only three of the years of record during the last 

 quarter of the 19th century and the first quarter 

 of the 20th. 4 Bass, in fact, had so nearly van- 

 ished soon thereafter from the Massachusetts 

 coast north of Boston that no commercial catches 

 were reported there for the period 1876 to 1883, 

 though an occasional fish may have been caught. 



There may have been a few more bass along 

 the coast of northern Massachusetts during the 

 next 17 years, for yearly catches ranging from 

 none up to 441 fish (1892) were reported for Essex 

 County between 1884 and 1900, while a number 

 were seined in the Merrimac River in 1897. But 

 this was again succeeded by a period of scarcity 

 so extreme that no bass were reported for the 

 Massachusetts coast north of Boston during the 

 next 30 years. 5 And the capture of a single fish 

 in the inner part of Massachusetts Bay by any 

 method was so unusual an event then that one of 

 44% pounds, caught near Brant Rock on the 

 southern shore of the Bay, in November 1930, 

 was given wide publicity in the newspapers. 



The bass of the coasts of Maine fared no better. 

 They had practically gone from the Androscoggin 

 by 1860; the reported catch for the entire coast- 

 line of Maine (already only about 27,000 pounds 

 in 1880) had fallen to about 1,600 pounds in 1902, 

 4,200 pounds in 1905, to 600 pounds in 1919. 

 And no commercial catches at all have been re- 

 ported from Maine in any subsequent year, 6 ex- 

 cept for 537 pounds in 1932. 



It seems that the bass population of the St. 

 John River system shared with those of Massa- 

 chusetts and of Maine in the general decline in 

 abundance during the first half of the nineteenth 

 century, for they were reported as much less 

 plentiful there by 1873 than they had been in 

 the early 1800's when they were a familiar sight 

 rolling and splashing at the surface in June. 7 

 But neither the St. John population, nor the 

 population at the head of the Bay of Fundy, nor 

 of the Annapolis River, seem ever to have fallen 

 to as low an ebb as has happened along Maine 

 and Massachusetts. In 1919, for example, when 

 no bass were reported from the Massachusetts 

 coastline of the Gulf (p. 401) and only 600 pounds 

 for Maine, 2,700 pounds were reported from the 

 Nova Scotian coastline of the Bay of Fundy, 8 1,600 

 pounds for the St. John River system. 



The year 1921 seems to have marked the "turn- 

 ing of the tide" for the bass in Cape Cod Bay 

 waters, for 4,784 pounds were taken that year at 



• Wood, New Englands Prospect, 1634, p. 47. 



« 1878 — 4,974 pounds; 1897 — 4,820 pounds; 1900—6,450 pounds. 



' Statistics have been published for 1903 to 1910, 1919, and 1928-1930. 



• Statistics published for 1929-1933, and 1935-1947. 



' See Adams (Field and Forest Rambles, 1873, pt. 3, Fishes, p. 248), who 

 described the Indians of the Melicete Tribe as still spearing good-sized bass 

 from their canoes in the St. John, in 1873. 



1 2,000 pounds from the Cobequid-Shubenacadie region (Hants County), 

 700 pounds from Annapolis County. 



